


Empty Memories

by elliot_cant_write



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Gen, Suicide, and i projected way too much onto connor, generally crappy parenting, mention of self harm, obviously, this is not a very happy story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-16 19:34:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11259531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliot_cant_write/pseuds/elliot_cant_write
Summary: Connor could hardly remember what it felt like to be hugged.





	Empty Memories

When Connor Murphy was in seventh grade, he tried to google how much the average person was hugged on a yearly basis. 

His interest was spiked after his english teacher had been talking about the importance of hugging, and how she tried to hug multiple people every day. Connor found this to be a ridiculous notion. What kind of person had enough people to care about them that they could be hugged once, and even multiple times, a day? He thought she was lying to make a point.

This turned out to be harder to find out about than he expected. He sat down at his computer late after everyone else in his house was sleep, all ready to use the internet to prove his silly teacher wrong. But he found that no statistics would tell him how often people were hugged. 

He eventually found an article about the health benefits of hugging. Most of the article was talking about chemicals and hormones and more things he couldn’t understand, but eventually it got to a part about touch-starved people and Connor found a line that confused him. It said that one third of people weren’t hugged on a daily basis. 

He absently tugged on his hair (it was getting too long) and chewed that idea over in his mind. That meant two thirds of people were hugged on a daily basis. How could that happen? Connor could count on one hand the times he had been hugged in the past year. There had been the last day of the year before. His choir teacher had hugged him on the way out of class and Alana Beck had hugged him when she hugged everyone else, although it hadn’t escaped his notice that she pulled away from him faster than she had pulled away from everyone else. Then three months previous, on his choir trip to an amusement park, one of the girls in his group had hugged him after they rode the biggest rollercoaster. That was three times in 365 and a fourth days. 

He scrolled back up on the page and highlighted one of the phrases. Touch starved. Was that what he was? 

He went back to all the results and in the search bar typed the new phrase and clicked on an article claiming to explain how to fix that. But Connor felt his heart fall when he saw that it just suggested hugging more people. How helpful.

%%%

A few days later the topic came up in class again and Connor tried to remember what hugging felt like.

%%%

Fourth grade. His father had gone away on some kind of trip for his job and had been gone for months. It was the first time Connor felt like he was losing control. He was just so angry all the time, and usually he didn’t know why. 

His mom didn’t help. He was scared she was losing control too. One second she’d be screaming about his father and how useless he was, then she’s be screaming at Connor about how he just made everything worse, then she would be comforting Zoe as Connor was left alone to try to remember how to make himself stop crying. 

Every few nights they’d start going at one another. Everything blended together in Connor’s mind. He could remember being curled up in his closet as his mom yelled about how the only reason she hadn’t crashed her car into a tree on the way home from the grocery store to get away from him was that somebody needed to take care of Zoe. He could remember being dragged to the hospital after crying for hours and hours and then waiting for hours and hours for the doctor to come in, only to find Connor calmly watching a Harry Potter marathon, having completely worn himself out. And he could remember sitting sobbing on the steps as his mom and Zoe sat in the next room searching the internet for a therapist to take him to.

Every memory of hugging in his mind was only one small misstep away from being back in one of those nights. A school night, long after ten o’clock, Connor and his mother had had another fight. He had no idea what it was over, but evidently his mother had felt bad because she came into his room after he was supposed to be asleep. Realistically he knew that he wasn’t being very quiet and Zoe had probably gone to complain, but he liked to pretend in his mind that his mother had actually cared enough to go check on him. Somehow this ended in her hugging him on his bed, lying there with him, in a way that he guessed was supposed to be comforting but to him just felt suffocating. Somehow this all upset him even more, in ways he had no idea how to put into words, and he ended up crying too hard to breathe all over again. And his mother tried to calm him down, as if she hadn’t been the reason he was so upset in the first place.

%%%

Connor was sitting in english trying to remember what is was like to be hugged. All he could feel was this horrible, helpless, suffocating feeling. He didn’t want to remember.

%%%

When he was in eighth grade, Connor Murphy’s father worked from home for a year. 

Connor and his father had never had an amazing relationship. It was never really anyone’s fault; their personalities were just too different. His father was always telling him to cut his hair, to man up, to try to put himself out there more. Connor liked his long hair and his books. 

That year the fights were non-stop and over every tiny thing. There were raised voices, insults, and words on both sides that took things way past too far. But his father never touched him.

It was morning. Before school started. Connor’s father was never up early. It was always his mother who gathered he and Zoe up and drove them to the bus stop. But one day for some reason he was there.

Connor could never remember why his father was up. Or what the fight was about. But he remembered the surprising crack and the sting after his father’s palm connected with his cheek. And he remembered instantly bursting into tears, not even because it hurt, but purely out of shock. 

Next memory, his mother had shuffled him and Zoe out of the house and into the car. Connor was sitting in the front seat and he remembered trying so hard to pull himself together enough so that nobody on the bus would know that he had been crying.It didn’t work well enough and the bus came and Zoe got on it and in a small moment of kindness, Connor’s mother drove him to school. He could never figure out what he had done to make his father so angry so soon after waking up.

%%%

That night, he googled how to make somebody love him. It gave him some steps to become closer to people. He bookmarked the page. 

%%%

Connor Murphy was in ninth grade and he felt so sick. He hadn’t ate anything all day because the thought of food made his stomach feel even worse. He was exhausted, mostly sure he had failed three different tests, and on the bus home Jared Kleinman had told him that his hair made him look like a drowned rat. It wasn’t a good day.

Of course, his father had taken the day off work. It was almost mother’s day and he wanted to take Zoe and Connor to pick up a card for their mother. He loaded them into the car and drove off and Connor leaned back against the seat, trying not to fall asleep as Zoe and his father talked about school and her friends and her art and how happy she was. 

At a red light, Connor saw his father make eye contact with him in the mirror and immediately knew he was screwed. His father made some offhand comment about how he wished Connor was as pleasant and successful and well-liked as Zoe and Connor tried so damn hard not to get upset but he felt so awful and he broke. He wasn’t even crying that hard but it was enough to be incriminating. His father went on another lecture about how he was almost fifteen, and a boy no less, and therefore much too old for that kind of silly behavior. Look at Zoe, she’s even younger than you but she is so respectful and well-behaved. She almost never causes any kind of trouble for us. 

%%%

Connor spent most of that night in the bathroom, trying not to throw up or completely break down so his parents or Zoe wouldn’t hear him. Before he eventually went to sleep, he googled how to hide emotions. 

%%%

It was tenth grade and Connor Murphy’s father hated his job. 

Every night, he came home already angry and nothing more than Connor looking at him was enough to start a screaming argument. 

The particular night that stood out the most, Connor was sitting on the couch not really doing anything. He was thinking about the book he had gotten out from the library earlier that day, one that he hadn’t started yet but was quite looking forward to. He felt unusually calm, not like he was sitting on the edge of blowing up at someone. It was nice. He was enjoying the calm.

Zoe was sitting at the table, talking to their mother about a movie they both wanted to see when he got home. Connor’s father went over to the table, kissed his mother’s cheek, and ruffled Zoe’s hair. He didn’t seem very happy, but he didn’t seem very angry until he looked over at Connor.

He asked, voice ice cold, why Connor was wearing his coat when it was the middle of June and perfectly warm out. At first, Connor considered not answering and kept his face perfectly straight. What was he to tell him? That he wore it just to spite them? That he wore it to hide his arms? That he wore it for the small sense of safety that it held? But that wasn’t good enough and when his father asked again, Connor forced himself to give the most insolent answer he could muster. Because he wanted to. 

That was the wrong answer. His father seemed to grow in presence, seeming impossibly big as Connor forced himself not to shrink into his coat or the back of the couch. He was stronger than that. He could stand this. 

His father’s voice became the thing of nightmares when he was like this. Normally smooth and touched by humor, it seemed as if he was swallowing nails and ready to spit them out at Connor. He yelled something about how Connor was making their lives miserable, how he hated his job and coming home to problems only made things worse, how he wanted to spend time with his family but couldn’t stand to be around Connor. Then he stormed off. 

Connor distantly heard Zoe burst into tears in the next room, and his mother’s voice comforting her. Telling her she did nothing wrong, that nobody was mad at her, that they were just mad at Connor. For some stupid reason this reminded Connor of fourth grade, when the biggest thing out of her mouth in the aftermath of the fights was that it wasn’t that she didn’t love him, she just didn’t like him very much. As if that was so much better.

Hearing her be so endlessly kind to Zoe when none of them even tried to be friendly towards him was almost too much and Connor pressed his hands into his eyes, trying to keep them from tearing up. He had worked on this. He couldn’t express these kinds of emotions anymore. They would only make his parents even more mad. It crossed his mind that it was hardly fair that Zoe was allowed to be upset about things, but he tried to ignore that.

%%%

That night, Connor stepped into his parents room to say goodnight, like normal. But he didn’t go to hug his father. Before he went to bed, he googled if it was okay for somebody to not like their parents. He clicked out of the tab before it could load all the way. He didn’t want to know.

%%%

It was eleventh grade and Connor Murphy was thinking about his future.

He was feeling surprisingly optimistic about things. He thought that perhaps, if he could just get away from his family, he could fix himself. He could express normal, human emotions. He could make friends. He could have the freedom to do things he enjoyed without being scared of somebody getting mad. He could be happy.

College was of course something he could think about. He could go wherever he wanted. He was thinking about New York. He had stayed in choir, against protests from his parents every year, and thought he was semi-decent. He could make a career out of it. Or maybe California. He loved the idea of San Francisco. Or just maybe Maine, for the cooler weather. 

It was a Sunday night and his mother wanted to go out for Italian. Sitting around the table, Connor between his father and Zoe, was more than uncomfortable, but he was okay. Zoe had made some joke about table salt and everyone was laughing. Then, for reasons he would never know and honestly didn’t really care to, his mother looked over at him.

She told him that she was doing research about colleges and had come across something interesting. For years, she had been telling him and Zoe how lucky they were that their father was in the military. As long as he was active duty, they would be able to go to college in whatever state they wanted on in-state tuition. That had been the one reason Connor had hope for his future. He could leave.

That Sunday night, in that goddamn shitty Italian restaurant sitting between a Food Lion and bowling alley, she told him that she had been mistaken, that that wasn’t true.

Connor felt like he was going to collapse in upon himself right there. How...how could she have been wrong? What was he going to do? He had to go in state, holy shit he had to go instate. He couldn’t go to New York, San Francisco, Maine, or anywhere far away from his family. He was trapped. His entire world had never felt so small.

%%%

That night he laid on his bed, looking at the ceiling, countless questions running through his head. He didn’t try to look up answers to any of them. He had found he didn’t really care.

%%%

It was the first day of his senior year and Connor Murphy was broken.

He had no hope for the future. He was never going to get out. He was never going to be okay. 

Life for him was over.

Zoe hated him. She had told him so that morning right before they went to school. She had told him that nothing he could ever do would change that, and he believed her. He didn’t deserve her forgiveness. He didn’t deserve her love. He didn’t deserve anyone’s.

He used the school computer to find it. It wouldn’t matter when they inevitably checked the computer history. He would be too far away. He googled how many sleeping pills it took to die.

%%%

It should still have been his senior year and Connor Murphy was dead but Evan Hansen wouldn’t let him be.

Evan had completely rewritten Connor as a person. Suddenly everyone cared about him.

Connor felt the traumatised fourth grader in the back of his mind wanting to scream that it wasn’t fair! Why was it that he hadn’t mattered at all before? Why hadn’t anyone wanted to be kind to him before Evan got involved? Why was it that he only mattered when everything about him was ignored?

Seeing Evan with his father was what hurt the most. The baseball glove had been a passive aggressive gift and they both knew it. It was a way to fake that he gave a damn about Connor and Evan couldn’t see that. But they were so, so kind to Evan. Why were they so kind to Evan?

If they could be kind to Evan, did that mean that Connor was the unloveable one all along?

**Author's Note:**

> I'm uncomfortable with how the ending came out.  
> This is probably kind of messy. I was way to emotional about the whole thing.  
> If anything, I'm sorry for any inaccuracies.  
> The way Connor was handled in the musical always kind of bothered me.  
> Thanks for reading.  
> My tumblr is penguinsarebetterthanpeople if anyone ever wants to hang out.


End file.
